There were the fiscal conservatives who had reservations about the price tag associated with permanence. The White House also got skittish, at one point fearing the votes weren’t there for some business tax breaks that Senate Republicans wanted to extend indefinitely.

Then there were the Democrats who were dead-set against the tax law, permanent or not. The optics of sidestepping the Senate’s parliamentarian, a maneuver that made permanence possible, only added to that partisan fight and meant Republicans would have to overcome a floor showdown with their political opposition.

HOW THE BIG BEAUTIFUL BILL BECAME LAW: READ MORE FROM THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER’S 10-PART SERIES

Grover Norquist, who as head of Americans for Tax Reform has long had close relationships with GOP leaders on Capitol Hill, said tax permanency “had to happen” and was “non-negotiable” in 2025.

And it was that abiding belief that got Republicans through the procedural gymnastics and agonizing vote-counting needed to make the tax cuts stick.

The obstacle presented by the Senate’s rules on budget reconciliation was especially difficult, as it gave Republicans narrow parameters to skirt the filibuster, but only if the provisions in their tax bill had a direct fiscal impact. The even greater challenge was that the law could not increase the deficit outside a 10-year window, which, in past GOP Congresses, meant temporary rather than permanent tax breaks.

Republicans ultimately found a loophole. The late Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) pursued a “current policy baseline” as chairman of the Senate Committee on the Budget, an accounting method that scored the extension of Trump’s expiring 2017 tax cuts as not adding to the deficit.

But there was still the problem of the Senate parliamentarian and the fact that Democrats were sure to challenge their ability to use that scoring method. Graham and other Republicans cited a 1974 budget law and said Democrats had adopted a “current policy” stance in the past. Democrats cried foul, claiming the GOP was using a “nuclear option” and weakening the rules of the Senate.

The rhetorical sparring consumed much of the final debate over tax permanence, and in the hours before the bill cleared the Senate with Vice President JD Vance’s tiebreaking vote, the New York Times ran a story headlined, “With Accounting Gimmick, Republicans Upend Senate Norms.”

Legislatively, the job that fell to Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-SD) and his staff was to devise a solution that did not directly overrule Parliamentarian Elizabeth McDonough, who was respected by members of both parties as a nonpartisan arbiter of Senate rules. Instead, they found a way to structure the debate so Republicans could vote to give Graham sole authority to decide the scoring method, not the parliamentarian.

“Whether or not the parliamentarian agreed with it or not, we felt we were standing on solid ground in terms of making that decision,” Thune said in an interview.

Out of the question were Trump’s calls to fire McDonough altogether, a reflection of his frustration at the fact that the rules of reconciliation were so tight and often meant language had to be tossed.

There was a political advantage to the repeated fiscal cliffs that came with temporary tax cuts. In the lead-up to the final vote, Republicans accused Democrats of supporting a $4.5 trillion tax hike because of their opposition to the bill.

But locking in the tax cuts avoided the risk that Democrats would be in power when they expired again. In an interview, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said, “With the permanence, we never have to talk about tax cuts again.”

“These aren’t cuts. It is now the law of the land. And anyone who wants to change it will have to talk about tax hikes,” he added.

Steve Daines draws a red line 

The commitment to tax permanence was particularly strong in the Senate. Sen. Mike Crapo (R-ID), the chairman of the Finance Committee, recalled members of his panel agreeing in their first meeting of the new Congress that it was their “No. 1 priority” with Trump’s 2017 cuts set to expire at the end of the year.

Sen. James Lankford (R-OK), vice chairman of the Republican conference, credited Crapo for being “solid as a rock” amid some trepidation from the White House and congressional Republicans.

But Daines, one of those tax writers, stood out in repeated interviews as one of the biggest evangelists for that position.

The senator, not one to issue public ultimatums, had spent months telling anyone who would listen that he was a “no” on the legislation unless several of its business tax breaks were made permanent. But the White House was urging him to back off that red line within a few days of the final Senate vote last summer.

At one point, the president dialed Daines up to see if he would budge.

“He was kind of testing to see my resolve — if I was going to be able to compromise on this issue of permanence, and I wasn’t,” Daines said of the phone call, recounting how he pitched the tax breaks to Trump as “jet fuel for the economy” and a matter of competing with China on tech innovation.

The price tag of permanence was the biggest factor working against Daines, as was the sway of fiscal hawks in the House who had convinced Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) to sunset those tax breaks after five years.

With Johnson’s whip operation underwater, Daines reiterated that the Senate’s policy priorities mattered, too, and that his vote was off the table if Trump ignored his demands.

“The House whip count was, gosh — I think they were 10 to 15 votes short, if I remember right,” Daines said in an interview. “Our vote count was tenuous, but a lot closer than where the House was, and there was some wiggle at that point around if, can we get permanence to work?”

“I just once again told the White House, and my colleagues — they all knew, staying consistent that it’s got to be permanent or I can’t vote for this,” he added.

That hard line paid off, and the permanent breaks he’d been advocating made it into the bill the Senate passed on July 1. The House subsequently swallowed that legislation after watching the upper chamber struggle through a 27-hour voting marathon.

Today, it stands as one of the single biggest imprints the Senate made on the tax law.

Daines defended tax permanence as a way to ensure certainty for the business sector and argued that full GOP control of Washington was so rare that Republicans had to go “big” while they had the chance.

“If you enjoy tax policy battles, this was the Super Bowl,” said the 63-year-old Daines, who is retiring after two terms representing Montana in the Senate. “The scale of what we delivered here, stopping the largest tax increase in American history … these are some of the most pro-growth policies that we could have in our tax code, and to prevail in that was a very rewarding experience.”

‘Pretty big bite at the apple’

The House and Senate were not entirely out of step when it came to permanency. The initial bill that passed the House in May of last year set lower rates for individual tax filers and even included one of Daines’s red lines.

In 2017, he and Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI) fought to include a deduction for so-called pass-through businesses, and that deduction was made permanent in the House bill.

As a cost-saving measure, House Republicans only extended business deductions for research and development, interest, and capital expenditures for five years. It was those three provisions that Daines described as his nonnegotiables in conversations with the White House.

The demands were unusual for Daines, a mild-mannered Trump ally who ordinarily does not hold up must-pass legislation. The two worked to elect a GOP majority in the Senate in 2024, when Daines led the National Republican Senatorial Committee.

But Daines, a businessman for more than two decades before he arrived in Congress, said he took inspiration from watching Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-LA) threaten to tank Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s nomination at the outset of the second Trump administration. And he was willing to play the role of “hostage taker,” as he put it — if that’s what it took to convince the president.

Republicans had a three-seat majority in the Senate, a narrow-enough margin that Daines knew he could effectively veto the bill by himself if faced with enough resistance.

“I remember Steve Daines in particular, from the very beginning, saying, ‘I’m not doing this unless it’s permanent.’ We are not doing this 10-year thing,” said Sen. Shelley Moore Capito (R-WV), the No. 4 Republican in the Senate.

“It was a huge issue,” she added. “And I thought to myself, that’s a pretty big bite at the apple. And he’s not one to throw the gauntlet down. But he did.”

Daines quickly consolidated support on the permanency issue with a February 2025 letter that he circulated to members of the Finance Committee and Senate leadership. Within days, Crapo, Thune, and Senate Majority Whip John Barrasso (R-WY) added their signatures.

That letter arrived on the Resolute Desk later that month, with Daines and Crapo making a trip to the Oval Office to speak with Trump on behalf of Senate Republicans. In total, his letter was signed by nine members of the Finance Committee, or about two-thirds of its Republican membership.

Trump caught off guard

By the spring of 2025, Senate Republicans appeared to be on the losing end of their biggest standoff with the House: whether to divvy up Trump’s agenda into one bill or two. House Republicans managed to pass one, all-encompassing bill by the narrowest of margins in May, dashing the Senate’s hopes of starting with a smaller piece of legislation focused on border security.

Regardless, Senate Republicans were adamant about making their mark on the bill, and that upper-versus-lower-chamber fight soon shifted to policy.

As expected, the tax language was especially controversial. There were simmering disagreements over the state and local tax deduction, or SALT — a break opposed by Senate Republicans that disproportionately helped high-income earners in blue states. They also planned to narrow “no tax on tips” and other Trump campaign promises to help offset the cost of the legislation.

When it came to the business tax breaks, Daines used a June meeting in the Cabinet Room of the West Wing to reiterate that he was a “no” if the five-year sunset in the House bill was not made permanent.

“Mr. President, if this is not permanent, I can’t support the bill,” Daines said, addressing Trump in a room full of advisers and members of the Finance Committee.

The comment seemed to catch the president off guard.

“Steve, you’re usually a pretty nice guy, but you’re talking pretty tough,” Trump retorted.

In the grand scheme of the bill, Daines’ ultimatum was hardly the only deficit-driver. The lower individual tax rates alone were projected to cost $2.2 trillion over 10 years. The measure also included non-tax priorities, including $175 billion for immigration enforcement and another $150 billion for defense.

The challenge was convincing the White House that permanence was as important as unsettled priorities such as SALT, and that GOP senators were willing to make as big a fuss as Republicans in the House.

In an interview, Thune recalled that two of Trump’s advisers — Bessent and economist Kevin Hassett — were urging the Senate to entertain four-, five-, or even 10-year extensions for some of the deductions instead of permanence.

Both were members of the Big Six, a group that included Thune, Crapo, Johnson, and House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Jason Smith (R-MO).

“Those guys all had kind of adopted the view that we should do some of the stuff on more of a shorter-term basis and juice the economy, and then we can come back and revisit this stuff later, or a future Congress can do that,” Thune said.

Daines described the proposals as a form of “pressure testing” and correctly judged that the White House would find a way to get fiscal hawks who were grudgingly accepting a bigger SALT deduction, a priority of New York Republicans, to also accept permanence.

Asked about the permanence issue, Bessent didn’t go into specifics with the Washington Examiner, though he pointed out that all parties involved in the negotiations had to compromise.

Graham pulls rank

The bill the House initially contemplated set a cap of $4.5 trillion in tax-related budget deficits and a minimum of $1.5 trillion in spending offsets. For that reason, House Freedom Caucus members were panning the current policy baseline as “fairy dust,” a way to obscure the true cost of the bill and water down the incentive to find offsets.

Crapo’s job as finance chairman was to convince those critics that the Senate was just as committed to Medicaid reform, the primary way that Republicans were keeping the bill’s price tag in check.

“I believe there was a feeling on their part that they first had to get comfortable with the notion that agreeing to a current policy baseline would not reduce the pressure to agree to deep entitlement reform,” Crapo told the Washington Examiner.

“I had many, many conversations saying that we will get the maximum entitlement reform possible with the votes, but it will not be changed if you make me do current law,” he added. “It will actually be worse if I have to do current law.”

In the Senate, Republicans were more adamant that Graham had the final say as budget committee chairman, not the parliamentarian, and that the matter could be settled with a point of order on the floor.

Yet several senators wanted to talk through the logistics of how that would work procedurally and the political implications of doing so. Cassidy was among the most dug in and, though he acquiesced based on the White House’s promise of meaningful deficit reduction, he delivered a blistering floor speech warning that Republicans were opening a “Pandora’s box” that would later be exploited by both parties.

Crapo called convincing those Republican colleagues one of the “toughest things” about the decision to use a current policy baseline.

TRUMP URGES IRAN’S ADDITION TO RUSSIAN SANCTION BILL: ‘WHAT LINDSEY WANTED’

Graham, for his part, called the decision “easy” in an interview conducted shortly before his death earlier this month, echoing Daines’s insistence on not wasting the opportunity Republicans were afforded with unified control of government.

“It wasn’t hard at all for me,” Graham said. “I thought it was just good policy for the country, and it did set in motion making the one big, beautiful bill special, which is the permanent nature of it.”

Zach Halaschak contributed to this story.

Members of the Washington Examiner’s staff who have worked on this series over the past several months are Haris Alic, Hailey Bullis, Bob Cusack, Christian Datoc, James A. Downs, Gabrielle M. Etzel, Lauren Green, Zach Halaschak, Chris Irvine, Joseph Lawler, Naomi Lim, Maydeen Merino, Callie Patteson, Mabinty Quarshie, Samantha-Jo Roth, David Sivak, and Ramsey Touchberry.